ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, the author curated an exhibition and publication titled Portraits of Our Elders which documented photos dating back to the 1860s. These photographs were a part of the political process that Aboriginal people were going through. These photographs document the important role Aboriginal women played by working hard to earn an income while also struggling to keep their families together. Proving that they were useful to the European economic system, while also generally conforming to European norms, such as becoming Christians, sending their children to school, and dressing well, are just some examples of 'tactics of survival'. There is no doubt that every Aboriginal family in Queensland has been in some way affected by the far reaching powers of the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of Sales of Opium Act of 1897, and successive Aboriginal protection policies. Many Aboriginal women was placed in domestic service 'under the Act' in the first half of the twentieth-century.
